Down, Down, Baby

Rochester Institute of Technology

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5-1-2016

Down, Down, Baby

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R . I. T

Down, Down, Baby

By Ciara M. Duffy

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Imaging Arts

School of Photographic Arts and Sciences College of Imaging Arts and Science

Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester, NY

Signature Page

Christine Shank Date

MFA Director

School of Photographic Arts and Sciences

Therese Mulligan, PhD Date

Abstract

Down, Down, Baby

BFA, Photography, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA, 2012 MFA, Imaging Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, May 2016

The series Down, Down, Baby is a visual diary, a documentation of the transitory period of my youth: the moments of freedom, debauchery, and recklessness I experienced with my closest companions. These individuals exist in these moments as a symbol for an undeniable attitude within youth culture that is greater than themselves. Down, Down, Baby illustrates our early reactions to independence and the animals we wanted to be and were, as well as the desire to stay young and relative by creating spectacles of ourselves. This way of living defies the logic of refined sensibility, political correctness, and good taste imparted on us during our

From the book Down, Down, Baby:Lokrum Island

From the book Down, Down, Baby: Extraction

From the book Down, Down, Baby: Alter

Extended Artist Statement

Georgia. The South. An anomaly to a Northerner, but I learned to be free-thinking in

Georgia. I willed myself to speak out, to create, to be independent in the South. If you’ve ever

lived in Savannah, Georgia, you’d know a world similar to Peter Pan’s “Neverland.” Here, as

opposed to staying physically young, as the Lost Boys do in Peter Pan, one remains young in the

mind. There is an underbelly of darkness in these swamps and one that I found comfort in. In

November 2008, my third month after moving to Savannah for college, I went to a party in the

backyard of a condemned house, and I watched as two girls doused a couch in lighter fluid and

lit it on fire. They were acting in the opposite fashion of anyone I had ever encountered before.

They wanted to destroy, to act out, to be crude. They were eighteen-year-old sloppy female

barbarians. Their behavior fascinated me, as did the situations we would soon find ourselves in,

and I felt compelled to document it. As time passed, all of us have moved apart. The encounters

we share today are few and far between, but the bond is still strong, and I still record the

moments we experience together. The end result, after eight years of documentation, is a body of

work titled Down, Down, Baby, a visual diary and a vast number of photographs that detail

significant and insignificant moments spent with those closest to me.

The successes within much of this series are weighted by time passed and by the intimacy

that was enfolded in this passage of time. My title, Down, Down, Baby, derives from a

hand-clapping game that I played during my youth with other girls my age. To perform the song/hand

game, one becomes engaged with one or multiple persons’ hands clapping together and

transitions to a snake-hip swivel. This hip gyration is both playful and lighthearted and

suggestive of future sexual endeavors. Many different male artists sampled and recorded their

their recording Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko-Pop and Nelly’s 2000 version, Country Grammar. Kyra

Gaunt discusses in her article Music between the Sexes, from Double-Dutch to Hip Hop how the

song’s popularity was born out of “the gendered and embodied relationships shared between the

sexes through female experience.”1 The multiplicity of meanings behind Down, Down, Baby

compares the innocence of this hand game played during the years of my adolescence to the

promiscuity that resonates throughout my own work.

The creation of this body of work originates from my compulsion to photograph the

moments outside of the commonplace. I’ve avoided the pitfalls of the unremarkable and the

everyday by documenting the actions in between. Outside of the constraints of school, work, or

responsibility is where I’ve focused my camera, the valuable time in which we are free to choose

how we spend our time. In this series, the moments in these photographs range from intense and

vulgar to quiet and serene. My successes come out of the anticipation that a certain energy will

appear.I am constantly attuned to the present so that I may comprehend the importance of the

scene that surrounds me. The moment an undeniable quality of life appears, I document it. The

photographs function as a conceptual space for my memories and perceptions of history outside

of the space of my own mind. This allows me to move through these memories without so much

subjectivity as common memory. Through these images, I am able to understand more in

hindsight when issues are given time and space and to remember certain details due to

documentation of them.

The incentive to create my own visual diary occurred after viewing Nan Goldin’s visual

diary series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. This body of work, created in the years following

1_{Gaunt, Kyra Danielle. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. New}

Goldin’s move to New York City at fifteen years old, includes moments from an insider’s

perspective of intimate experiences that one could only have with those closest to him or her. As

Goldin says about her friends:

We are bonded not by blood or place, but by a similar morality, the need to live fully and for the moment, a disbelief in the future, a similar respect for honesty, a need to push limits, and a common history.2

Goldin photographs moments that are personal and private, but her subjects are very

much participatory. To create this level of intimacy, you have to gain the trust of your subjects,

but you also need to be aware of when to back off. This sentiment resonates within my own

relationships with my subjects. These are the individuals I feel closest to and who actively

collaborate with my camera and me. A poignant remark Goldin made of her collaboration with

her friend Kathleen is that she is attracted to photographing her due to her “combination of

wildness and fragility.”3 Paige is one of my most photographed subjects, similar to the

relationship that Goldin has with Kathleen: Paige stays open emotionally and physically in front

of my camera. These are moments of vulnerability, rage, anxiety, narcissism, intoxication, and

pleasure. She is an intriguing and enticing subject, owing to her beauty, her ferocity, her

tenderness, and her sartorial choices.

The ephemeral nature of both Goldin’s and my photographs highlights the power of a

moment. Guido Costa states, “There is no covert documentary or ideological purpose, no

neo-realist mission in Goldin’s work—not, at least, in these early shots. There is, however, a pure

determination to capture the moment, free from domination by abstract constructs of art.”4 These

are fleeting, temporal instants that exist for only a particular amount of time. Goldin furthered

2 _{Goldin, Nan. “Preface.” In The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, edited by Marvin Heiferman, Mark Holborn, and}

Suzanne Fletcher, 6–9. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1986.

3 _{Goldin, Nan. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 6–9.}

the ephemeral quality of her work in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by presenting 690 35mm

color slides in a looped 45-minute slideshow format at exhibitions.5 My decision to utilize paper

pads as means to exhibit my photographs is also one that furthers this transitory quality.

The photographs in Down, Down, Baby depict the feral nature of our youth. I use the

term feral to describe a behavior that is both uncultivated and tempestuous. It felt liberating to

act in a ruthless manner; to be messy and untamed was an emancipation from the standards once

expected of us during adolescence. This series illustrates early reactions to independence, the

animals we wanted to be and were, and the moments that technology saturated our lives, as well

as the desire to stay young and relative by creating spectacles of ourselves. The decision to focus

predominantly on female characters in my work is based on the abundance of depictions of these

individuals, who have been a constant presence in my life. My subjects exist in these moments as

a symbol for an undeniable attitude within youth culture that is greater than themselves. This

way of living defies the logic of refined sensibility, political correctness, and good taste.

The young Dutch female artist Melanie Bonajo examines different aspects and issues that

her generation contributes to the world through her videos, performances, photographs, and

installations. In her own words, she “explores the spiritual emptiness of her generation, examines

peoples’ shifting relationship with nature and tries to understand existential questions by looking

at our domestic situation, ideas around classification, concepts of home, gender, and attitudes

towards value.”6 Bonajo examines the complex relationship between real presence versus cyber

presence and the barrier, or, rather, lack thereof, in our private and public lives due to social

media platforms. This subject is particularly interesting to me because, over the course of this

5 _{Goldin, Nan. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016.}

http://collection.whitney.org/object/8274. Accessed May 4, 2016.

6 _{Bonajo, Melanie. Bio: Melanie Bonajo. Accessed May 2016. http://www.melaniebonajo.com/index.php?/projects/}

series, I observed my friends place more importance on their cyber presence over their physical

and mental presence.

Bonajo often discusses the topics that society prefers to conceal and does so with wit and

humor throughout. Kara L. Rooney, in a discussion about Bonajo’s beliefs in her article Freedom

Spirit/Ritual Anarchist, states:

The Dutch have a word for this, keurslijf. An abstract concept in and of itself, keurslijf

refers to the societal demands and “proper” modes of being imposed upon the individual. In its corporeal representation, the corset is its closest symbol. To push against this is to push against the powers that restrain us. Bonajo’s revolutionary discourse is grounded as much in her life experience and rejection of keurslijf.7

Bonajo’s early work demonstrates this push. One photographic series that later adapted to

a video, titled Pee on Presidents, is a collection of over 500 photographs taken from 2000 to

2013 of Bonajo’s female friends’ peeing in public. Bonajo explains this work:

The series often try to address the subject of female liberation and (body) representation, meaning they are not stylized images designed to appeal to the implied male spectator projected upon us by advertisement and mainstream media. Taking yourself not too seriously is liberating the mind and spirit. Especially in these times of extreme narcissism, this can be a cure for society.8

Bonajo’s sentiments in her work align with many post-feminist viewpoints, as do they

with the ideas that drive my work. As Mirjam Western states in her Introduction for the

catalogue Rebelle, “The concept of ‘post-feminism’ suggests a more sophisticated, more

intellectual, more contemporary concept, more capable of self-reflection, humor, and relativism

than ‘feminism’ had been before it.” 9

7 _{Rooney, Kara L. Melanie Bonajo: Freedom Spirit/Ritual Anarchist, 2016. http://www.melaniebonajo.com/index.}

php?/projects/dialogue/. Accessed May 2016.

8 _{Frank, Priscilla. “Meet The High Priestess of the Anti-Selfie, Dutch Artist Melanie Bonajo (NSFW).” The}

Huffington Post, September 15, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/15/melanie-bonajo_n_5811496.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/15/melanie-bonajo_n_5811496.html.

9 _{Westen, Mirjam, Els Brinkman, N'Goné Fall, and Saskia Bultman. “Introduction.” In Rebelle: Art and Feminism}

These attitudes are dispersed throughout Down, Down, Baby but align most directly in

the depictions of sexual intimacy in this series. The female perspective is something crucial to a

viewer’s understanding of my work. In many of the photographs from this series, my female

gaze is present. Men are often portrayed as the object of my desire and in a passive position,

“feminizing” them by conventional devices. Abigail Solomon-Godeau spoke often of her interest

in the perspective of the female photographer in Sexual Difference: Both Sides of the Camera.

She asks us to consider how the body is presented as a photographic subject. What different does

it make, then, when a woman is behind the camera? She answers by acknowledging that it is not

determined simply by biology, for notions of sexuality and desire are socially constructed. She

states, “For women, whose position in the economy of looking conventionally resides with the

surveyed rather than the surveyors, the use of the camera to ‘expose’ and capture the social and

sexual transactions of others is particularly charged.”10

The way in which the photographs in Down, Down, Baby are displayed in an exhibition

invites the audience to interact with my work. As a photographer, I’ve dedicated my practice to

imparting moments of my private life to the public, and I wanted to bring this idea one step

further. The photographs are exhibited on individual pads of paper on the walls, beckoning

further interaction between the audience and artist. The audience is encouraged to physically

bring a piece of the artist’s experience home with them, a further opportunity to share in these

memories. Control of these images is then imparted to the audience. I am now a spectator in the

gallery, watching the audience choose which photographs they want to bring into their lives. The

experientiality of the paper pads at the exhibition heightens their value. The touch and sound of

the paper pads while being torn off from the wall enhances one’s experience with the

photographs and satisfies the senses. When all of the photographs on the paper pads are taken, all

that is left is the cardboard backing, a memory of what was.

The photographs in Down, Down, Baby depict the years of my youth, freedom,

debauchery, and recklessness. These moments were lived without rationality, during the period

in one’s life that entails constant evolution and a deep exploration of one’s self. Down, Down,

Baby exists as a physical memento, a reminder of the moments that have outlined my youth. The

non-conventional family I have made through my friendships defines me for who I am and

Bibliography

Bonajo, Melanie. Bio: Melanie Bonajo. http://www.melaniebonajo.com/index.php?/projects/info/.

Accessed May 2016.

Costa, Guido. “Introduction.” In Nan Goldin, 3–15. London, UK: Phaidon, 2001.

Frank, Priscilla. “Meet The High Priestess of the Anti-Selfie, Dutch Artist Melanie Bonajo (NSFW).”

The Huffington Post, September 15, 2014.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/15/melanie-bonajo_n_5811496.html

Gaunt, Kyra Danielle. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to

Hip-Hop. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Goldin, Nan. “Preface.” In The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, edited by Marvin Heiferman, Mark

Holborn, and Suzanne Fletcher, 6–9. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1986.

Goldin, Nan. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016.

http://collection.whitney.org/object/8274. Accessed May 4, 2016.

Rooney, Kara L. Melanie Bonajo: Freedom Spirit/Ritual Anarchist, 2012.

http://www.melaniebonajo.com/index.php?/projects/dialogue/. Accessed May 2016.

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Sexual Difference, Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Columbia

University, 1988.

Westen, Mirjam, Els Brinkman, N'Goné Fall, and Saskia Bultman. “Introduction.” In Rebelle: Art and